This specification relates to information presentation.
The Internet provides access to a wide variety of resources such as video and audio files, web pages for particular subjects, book articles, and news articles. A search system can identify resources in response to a text query that includes one or more search terms or phrases. The search system can rank the resources based on their relevance to the query and on measures of quality of the resources and can provide search results that link to the identified resources. The search results are typically ordered for viewing according to the rank.
Some search systems can obtain or infer a location of a user device from which a search query was received and include local search results that are responsive to the search query. In some systems, local search results are search results that have been classified as having local significance to the particular location or to the location of the user device that submitted the query. For example, in response to a search query for “coffee shop,” the search system may provide local search results that reference web pages for coffee shops near the location of the user device.
Some search queries may include location information as part of the query. For example, a search query may include a specific location, landmark, geographic feature, region or other location designator.
Still other queries may include terms that are more relevant to one or more geographic locations or regions. For example, some users in some parts of the United States may submit the search query “rock quarry” more often than users in other areas. There may be one or more geographic regions where a rock quarry is a local tourist attraction, for example. The frequency of search queries, such as for “rock quarry,” may change over time, and changes in the frequency may differ by geographic region.